Four reads to carry you through lunch.
|
The Guardian
|
Alessio Perrone
|
|
In June 2020, after a mortician called police, Matthias Graw’s forensic institute in Munich autopsied a woman’s body. Her son, Otto Z., blamed Graw. Alessio Perrone reconstructed what came next. Otto Z. hired ghostwriters to fake an anthology from a 1980s Romanian medical congress, seeded with passages from Graw’s doctoral thesis. In 2022, plagiarism hunters accused Graw of copying it. The scandal cast doubt on criminal verdicts that relied on his institute’s testimony. A Munich court later convicted Otto Z., finding he meant to destroy Graw. He still believed his mother had not been dead when she arrived.
|
|
|
Slate
|
Christina Cauterucci
|
|
In the first three months of 2026, data center opponents stopped or delayed 75 projects worth almost $130 billion. Seventy-one percent of Americans told Gallup they would oppose one nearby. Christina Cauterucci went inside the PR industry built to change that. JSA wrote reports of 100-plus pages rating how easily a town could be won over. KAOH Media paid locals for one-on-one coffees with residents. The Hoyt Organization ran environmental justice workshops in Virginia that steered attendees toward accepting a more efficient data center. Adam Waitkunas, who staked his career on the work, expected the backlash to grow.
|
|
|
In the summer of 2021, Olga Khazan felt stuck in a rut and unhappy. So she gave herself three months to change her personality. Khazan recounted her own experiment, signing up for a string of new activities meant to make her more extroverted, more agreeable, and less neurotic. She consulted psychologists along the way, including Brent Roberts at the University of Illinois. The research said traits could shift with practice. Whether acting like a different person for three months would make her one was the open question.
|
|
|
On March 29, 1516, the Venetian Senate ordered every Jew in Venice onto a walled island once used as a foundry dump. The Jews paid for their own guards. Alexander Lee traced how the city, for more than a century, expelled Jewish moneylenders and then invited them back whenever war wrecked its economy. When defeat at Agnadello in 1509 drove hundreds of Jewish refugees into the city, officials stopped asking how to remove them. They asked how to contain them. Lee argued every one of those small steps could have been stopped. He was not only talking about 1516.
|
|